Conference Agenda

This paper explores modal fluidity in Millennial gospel music, a significant stylistic element of the Black gospel genre that warrants further analytical examination. Modal fluidity deals with the traversal of the relative and parallel axes (relative and parallel minors) in relation to a centralized major tonic. This paper demonstrates how Fluidity Networks can serve as an analytical device that encompasses the visual and aural mapping of the relative and parallel fluidity within Millennial gospel, providing a tonal snapshot. After I explore Tye Tribbett’s “Sinking,” I engage the literature surrounding double tonalities by Trevor de Clercq and Drew Nobile. From there, I highlight salient characteristics and schemata within the tonal syntax of Millennial gospel. Finally, building upon the work of Braxton Shelley, my discussion culminates in an analysis of Richard Smallwood’s “Thank You” by showcasing a modally fluid mapping of tonal centers throughout the piece.

Contemporary gospel music’s signature harmonic progression remains without a label that specifies its most typical realization in this style, accommodates its most common variants, and well applies to a broader array of popular music. This presentation combines the term “inversion” (Shelley 2019, 2021) with my (2023) subscript-equipped MnM labeling to produce “inverted M2m_R” for this purpose, allowing for this label to vary slightly to accommodate bespoke interpretational needs that attend or ignore certain details such as temporal order and tonal position. These needs include analysis, such as a reading of the vamp from Chika’s 2019 autobiographical single “High Rises,” in which two different components of an inverted M2m_R initially appear before the progression is delivered in its entirety, paralleling the singer’s protracted struggles against adversity. These needs also include stylistic variance, such as pop music’s occasional transformation of the inverted M2m_R into what I (2014) call its ”tonal inverse” of m10M_R.

Despite its distinct sound, gospel’s inverted M2m_R also occupies a well-delineated position within an extended tonal common practice that encompasses idioms characteristic of both classical and popular styles. This argument asserts that the idioms of this extended common practice optimize a set of five mutually incompatible desiderata that form a five-dimensional feasibility region: minimal voice-leading work, maximal consonance above the lowest note, avoidance of parallel perfect fifths, singularity of diatonic designation, and frequency of major-minor tonic harmony within the designated diatonic scale(s). Hypothetically, contemporary gospel’s inverted M2m_R emerged within this practice, as many other idioms had, through tradeoffs: novel yet still optimizing redistributions among these five preferences of the priorities of older and classical idioms.